"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Louie Gohmert, A Devout Foe Of Public Education, Thinks We Need Shoot-Outs In Schools

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A close friend of mine is an elementary school teacher in Compton, one of L.A.'s roughest communities. This year he has a white kid in his class-- for the first time in the decade he's been there. Almost half his young charges have a parent or sibling in prison. One girl's granny is in jail. Gun violence is a fact of life in Compton. Teachers there worry that it's easier for young people to access guns there than to access mental health services or most social services. What they don't worry about is Huckabee's irrelevant assertion that the problem has something to do with not having prayers led by teachers in classrooms. (Yeah, the Huckabee whose son, already famous for torturing dogs, was arrested trying to smuggle a Glock onto a plane... that Huckabee.)My Compton friend's favorite Member of Congress-- at least in terms of derision-- is not Allen West or Michele Bachmann or Todd Akin. He just loves stories about Texas Neanderthal Louie Gohmert. He was howling last week when I told him Gohmert was the only Member of Congress who voted, in a 398-1 roll call, against a bill to strike the word "lunatic" from federal law. Well Fox News Sunday did a special on the mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut and who better to come on and cater to the morons who watch Fox than Gohmert? Gohmert, like many Republican congressmen, is a gun-worshipper and an NRA stooge and he was the one who had howled the loudest about the victims in the Aurora, Colorado theater mass murder not having had the guns they would have needed for a mass shootout.

During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation's Istook Live! show, Gohmert was asked why he believes such senseless acts of violence take place. Gohmert responded by talking about the weakening of Christian values in the country."You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of terror like this takes place," Gohmert said....Ernest Istook, the host of the show and a former Oklahoma congressman, jumped in to clarify that nobody knows the motivation of the alleged Aurora gunman. Gohmert said that may be true, but suggested the shootings were still "a terrorist act" that could have been avoided if the country placed a higher value on God."People say ... where was God in all of this?" Gohmert said. "We've threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God's name, they're going to be jailed ... I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don't want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present."Gohmert also said the tragedy could have been lessened if someone else in the movie theater had been carrying a gun and took down the lone shooter. Istook noted that Colorado laws allow people to carry concealed guns."It does make me wonder, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying a gun that could have stopped this guy more quickly?" he asked.

Sunday, he was, of course, up to the same song and dance on Fox: "Having been a judge and reviewed photographs of these horrific scenes and knowing that children have these defensive wounds, gun shots through their arms and hands as they try to protect themselves, and, hearing the heroic stories of the principal, lunging, trying to protect, Chris, I wish to God she had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids."

Pressed by host Chris Wallace on why ordinary citizens need semi automatic weapons that shoot 5 bullets per second, Gohmert said that any restrictions on fire arms could lead to the slippery slope of full prohibition and said that American amass weapons to protect themselves from the government.“For the reason George Washington said a free people should be an armed people,” Gohmert explained. “It ensures against the tyranny of the government, if they know the biggest army is the American people, then you don’t have the tyranny that came from King George. That is why it was put in there and that’s why once you start drawing the line, where do you stop?”A Mother Jonesanalysis of 61 mass murders over the last 30 years found that “in not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.” As one leading expert explained, “given that civilian shooters are less likely to hit their targets than police in these circumstances,” arming civilians could often lead to more chaos and deaths. Law enforcement groups usually oppose state-efforts permitting concealed weapons on college campuses, citing safety concerns.